Pumpkin and chickpea soup

Yes! Today I prepared my first pumpkin of the season. It comes from my friends' garden.
I'm feeling a bit ill so I made a spicy soup to fight my cold.


1-2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 small onions, peeled and chopped
1 small dried chilli pepper (peperoncino), chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1/2 tsp dried coriander seeds, crushed
6 cm ginger, peeled and cut in 3 big pieces
1 small pumpkin
2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
400 g chick peas, cooked and drained (this is the weight of cooked and drained chick peas)
salt


Fry onion and chilli in oil for a few min on low heat, add ginger and coriander seeds and fry for a few more min. Raise the heat a little, add pumpkin, cover the pan and fry for a few more min. Then add potato and chick peas, fry for a few min and add a little water if necessary to avoid burning. Add more boiling water, bring to the boil, add plenty of salt, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30 min. Remove the pieces of ginger and serve, e.g. with fresh coriander leaves.

Notes:
You might add leek.
You can also chop the ginger finely or grate it and leave it in the soup.
The taste of the coriander seeds was a bit weak, so you could probably add a whole teaspoon of them.
On the whole the soup received acclaim, from grumpy old men!

Red beetroot soup

When I got home, I decided to start cooking the red beetroots from my friends' vegetable garden, right away. I still had some leftover vegetables so I combined everything in a soup.


3 small onions, peeled and chopped
6 small carrots, peeled and chopped
1 red pepper, washed and chopped
1 courgette, washed and chopped
3 red beetroots, peeled and chopped
a bit of celery, washed and chopped
chopped parsley
olive oil
2 cloves
2-3 bay leaves
vegetable stock

Fry onions and celery stalks for a few min in olive oil on low heat.
Add red beetroots, carrots and pepper, raise the heat a little and fry for some more min.
Add courgette and celery leaves and fry for some more min.
Add boiling water, lots of salt, pepper, cloves, bay leaves and vegetable stock.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and let the soup simmer for 30-45 min until the vegetables are cooked.
Serve with chopped parsley.

Note
The original recipe (from the cook of Lukemieke, a vegetarian restaurant which existed in Leuven when I was studying there) uses these vegetables: 300 g red beetroot, 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1/2 white or green cabbage and 2 leeks. It also suggests serving the soup with sourcream. I added a tbsp of extra virgin olive oil.
After tasting the soup I decided that in future I would leave out the red pepper (too tangy) and courgette (got too soft) and add leek and potato in stead.

Stuffed courgette flowers

Today I went to visit my friends in the countryside. I witnessed the preparation of a house specialty and I asked for the recipe, so here comes.

180 g ricotta
100-200 g boiled spinach
some grated parmesan
2 tbsp fresh basil leaves, chopped
15 courgette flowers
pinch of nutmeg
1 tbsp olive oil
125 g flour

Mix ricotta, spinach, parmesan, nutmeg and basil leaves. Season with pepper and salt.
Wash the flowers delicately, make an incision and remove the part in the middle.
Stuff each flower with a teaspoon of the ricotta mixture.
Make a liquid batter with flour, olive oil and some water.
Dip the the flowers quickly in the batter, let them drip a bit then fry them in frying oil.
Serve immediately, sprinkled with salt.

These were the flowers, straight from the garden.

Stuffing them

Stuffed

Frying them

and savouring them! Delicious!

Note: you can omit the parmesan for a lighter dish.

My friends live in a great house with a fantastic garden: they have a vegetable garden, a flower garden, chicken, sheep, fruit trees... and today was a beautiful autumn day, perfect for enjoying this.

We ate outside, probably for the last time this year.

My friends' dahlias

and sheep, in a meadow with an apple tree bearing loads of fruit

The hazelnut harvest

which needs to be peeled

and the walnut harvest, which we gathered in about 15 minutes; there are so many nuts this year!

and this is the loot I took home.